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When health care reform is enacted to help insure almost all Americans, and initiate dramatically needed consumer protection into the health insurance industry, there was an outcry against it from the right, blathering about unconstitutionality.

When GM and Chrysler got massive loans from the government collateralized by stock, the right whinged about socialism, as if that somehow represented workers’ control of production.

When the banks got too clever for their own good and found themselves almost insolvent, when the entire economy collapsed and was on the brink of a once-in-a-century downward spiral, the right bitched and moaned that bailouts – many of which have since been repaid, with interest – were the worst thing since Hitler murdered 6,000,000 innocents and Stalin collectivized farms.

When Arizona passes a law that has the effect of requiring natural born United States citizens of Latino origin to carry citizenship papers with them at all times for wholly domestic travel, the right shrugs and tells the brown people, tough shit.

Just wanted to clear up what they do and don’t consider an unconstitutional outrage. Social programs = bad, unconstitutional police-state-junior = dandy.

Maybe we need to institute the same policy in Florida and direct it at illegal Cuban immigrants. Let’s see how that goes over. How about it, Mr. Rubio?

As people decry Obama’s dastardly socialism, let’s put into perspective the percentage of American industry that has been nationalized in order to prevent it from failing and throwing hundreds of thousands more people instantly out of work.

An Obama administration would be no more socialist or communist than the Bush administration, or any prior president’s administration. Anyone who says otherwise is either an ignoramus or a demagogue. Raising the upper tax bracket by a few percent while lowering the rates for middle-income earners is not socialism. All they’ve got left is a hammer-and-sickle variant of Godwin’s Law. Fail.

My parents actually fled socialism in the mid-60s to come to this country and make a better life for them and me. So, no, I don’t remotely consider myself a supporter of the system that my parents fled.

But because I believe in the idea that society should pay for things like Fire protection, Police protection, health care for the poor and elderly, etc., the Ron Paul people are so happy to label me a “socialist”, without regard for what that word means generally (a hundred different things), or more specifically that it is an epithet that, to me, are fighting words.

Seriously, however, being called a “socialist” by the likes of the local Ron Paul supporters is something I take as a compliment. Because in practice, that’s all they do.

Yes, they put up signs and rally in Niagara Square for their candidate. But they also come on the internet and, like the sandwich-board messiah of yore, predict the end of the world in intemperate tones. Other than that, it comes down to labeling those who disagree with their opinions as “socialists”, “sheeple”, equating them with SLA-era Patty Hearst, and accusing them of being complicit in perpetuating a fascist/socialist/nazi America.

Yet these insult-hurling, people-labeling, philosopher-adoring people complain bitterly when insults are hurled at them, when they are labeled, and when their views are mocked as strenuously as they mock others. I believe the market gives them the liberty to purchase some cheese with their whine.